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ChatGPT inventor OpenAI boss pushed out
Was the public face of OpenAI and is no longer there: Sam Altman. photo
© Sven Hoppe/dpa
It’s an earthquake for the young AI industry: OpenAI boss Sam Altman loses his job. With ChatGPT, OpenAI and Altman started the hype about artificial intelligence.
Dispute over direction at the world’s most important start-up: The development company behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT is surprisingly getting a new boss. Co-founder and company director Sam Altman left his company OpenAI because the board of directors withdrew confidence in it. Altman was the public face of OpenAI – and, more broadly, the boom in artificial intelligence.
OpenAI’s statement on Friday was unusually strongly worded: Altman had not been honest in his communication with the supervisory board. “The Board of Directors no longer has confidence in its ability to continue to lead OpenAI,” it said. There were no further details, and the tech industry in San Francisco and Silicon Valley then began to guess what might have happened.
Indication of tensions
The renowned technology journalist Kara Swisher wrote that the trigger was differences between two camps at OpenAI – namely between the for-profit and the non-profit wings of the company. OpenAI was originally founded in 2015 by Altman and, among others, Tesla boss Elon Musk as a non-profit start-up that was intended to research artificial intelligence. However, over time – and a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft – OpenAI became more and more a profit-oriented company. Musk, among others, repeatedly criticized this.
The official communication already contained a reference to such tensions between the lines. It specifically emphasized that OpenAI was deliberately built for one mission: “to ensure that general artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.” We remain committed to this goal.
According to Swisher’s information, a trigger for Altman’s expulsion was the OpenAI developer conference, where, among other things, the possibility of developing specialized versions of ChatGPT and making money with it was presented. It all happened too quickly for the non-profit group of OpenAI, Swisher wrote on the online platform According to Swisher’s sources, Altman learned of the board’s decision just 30 minutes before the announcement was made public.
Murati temporarily takes over as chief executive
A few hours after Altman was forced out, another co-founder, Greg Brockman, also resigned. He referred to “today’s news.” Brockman was chairman of the board of directors until Friday and, according to the statement, was expected to leave that position but remain with the company.
According to information from Swisher and the also well-connected industry service “The Information”, one initiator of the action against Altman was chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.
Technology boss Mira Murati will temporarily take over the top position while the permanent successor is to be regulated, OpenAI said. Altman was in the spotlight until the end: on Thursday he spoke at the summit of the APEC group of countries in San Francisco.
The chatbot ChatGPT can formulate sentences at the linguistic level of a human. Its publication around a year ago sparked a hype about artificial intelligence. OpenAI has thus become a pioneer in the technology. Microsoft entered into a multi-billion dollar pact with the company to bring its technology into the company’s products. Other tech heavyweights such as Google, Amazon and the Facebook group Meta presented competing software for ChatGPT.
Short statement from Altman
Microsoft emphasized that it is sticking to its collaboration with OpenAI. At the same time, the software giant made it clear that the AI company could not simply withdraw from the cooperation: “We have a long-term agreement with OpenAI and have access to everything we need to implement our innovation agenda.”
The pioneering role is lucrative for OpenAI: According to media reports, a total valuation of $86 billion was assumed for the sale of employee shares. This means that OpenAI has joined the ranks of the most valuable companies not listed on the stock exchange – alongside the video service TikTok and Musk’s space company SpaceX.
While there was speculation about the reasons for Altman’s expulsion, in a brief statement to X he simply wrote that he would provide information about his plans for the future later.
Altman received glowing encouragement from former Google boss Eric Schmidt. For him, Altman is a hero who has changed our world forever, wrote Schmidt at X. He can’t wait to see what Altman does next – and billions of people will benefit from it.